knife, holding it low and close against my hip. If we had to fight, I’d fight. I just hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.
I’d barely gotten settled when three guards in Torin’s livery came around the corner. Two of them were holding those nasty tridents from before; the third was peering at an oiled parchment map. I couldn’t see the whole thing, but what I could see made me fairly sure that it was a map of the knowe. It had the right twisting, curving lines, and it looked like it had been treated to stand up to being submerged.
“There are eight storage rooms on this level,” said the one with the map. “If we search them all, we can go back to someplace decent.”
“Can you imagine having a palace this defensible and sacrificing half of it for air-breathers?” The second guard sounded utterly dismissive. “The county where I did my training had a single chamber set aside for the Selkies, and even that, they knew we could flood in an instant. Kept them in their places.”
“Do you really think the Lady is in Ships?” asked the third, nervously. “Rumor says she’s come to slaughter the Selkies for what they did. The water will run red, and we’ll have to find new couriers.”
“Or we could cut off communication with those lander fools entirely, and watch them tear themselves to pieces worrying about war,” said the second. He chuckled. “Frightened fish, every one of them. They’ll leave the coasts in droves once they realize they can’t keep tabs on us any longer—and good riddance. The farther we are from those air-breathing weaklings, the better.”
“I heard she was intending to resurrect the Roane,” said the guard with the map. The other two turned to look at him. He raised his head and looked impassively back. “Didn’t you wonder why the Selkies would be gathering in Ships, and not running for the deepest waters they could find to shelter them? She’s not slaughtering them, she’s empowering them. Uplifting them. The Lady is bringing back the Roane, and then they’ll be bought by the strongest nobles, and we’ll finally have the future in our hands again.”
Right. That was quite enough of that. We didn’t know where Peter was; we couldn’t allow these arrogant, careless people with their sharp, sharp tridents and their nasty ideas to get to him before we did. I stepped away from the wall, aware that Quentin wouldn’t be able to see me moving until he spotted the consequences of that motion. That was fine. He could catch up.
One nice side effect of healing the way I do: I’ve basically gone through a massive crash course in humanoid anatomy over the past few years, as people have stabbed, skewered, and otherwise damaged literally every internal organ I have, and a few I’m not sure actually exist. If there’s a way to hurt a body, odds are good that I’ve experienced it, and that makes me uniquely well-suited to challenges like incapacitating three guards without bringing the rest of the invading forces down on my head. Being invisible didn’t hurt either, in the moment.
Sliding my knife back into its sheath, I crept up on the two guards with the tridents. Neither of them was wearing a helmet. That would help. Knocking a person unconscious is a lot more difficult than most people assume it is, especially if you’re set on doing the job without opening any skull fractures. I found that I was less concerned about skull fractures than I maybe should have been. Dianda had healers on staff, which meant right now, Torin had healers on staff; any damage I did, short of killing somebody, could be undone in short order.
After the things they’d been saying about selling the Roane to the highest bidder, they might be happier with a little head trauma than with me telling the Luidaeg what they’d said.
Silently, I reached up, taking advantage of my invisibility to align my hands at the perfect angles before I slammed the two guards’ heads together. They shouted, startled and hurt by the blow, although neither of them went down. That was all right. I hadn’t been expecting to take them out with a single hit, although it would have been nice. I slammed their heads together again before they could react, and this time the guard on the left reeled back, clearly injured.
The guard on the right spun around and stabbed her trident at the space where she assumed I was